


Bellona's Bride

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: AU, F/M, Fusion, Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Space Admiral Duncan shouldn't have turned his back on Servalan and the dear partner of her greatness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bellona's Bride

_How far is't called to Forres?_ (I,iii,39)

Guards Sergeant Travis, E., barely on his feet after the battle, pulled himself to attention by pure force of will. The gash in his forehead dripped, half-blinding him.

"What bloody man is this?" Space Admiral Duncan asked. "It looks like he can give us the latest state of the revolt."

Space Captain Ross said, "This is the sergeant who like a good and hardy soldier fought against my captivity. Hail, brave friend!"

Travis saluted, wondering if that was the final effort that would precipitate him flat on his face in the Staffroom. "It's that fucking Macdonwald, the Group Leader of Fucking Cawdor," he said. "Worthy to be a rebel, for to that the multiplying villainies of nature do swarm on him. And Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling showed like a rebel's whore. Didn't help, though. There was a Lieutenant--her name's Servalan--who just hacked her way all up the line. Didn't shake hands with him, just unseamed him from the nave to the chops and fixed his head upon our battlements. And when we thought it was over, no it wasn't, then it was the fucking Norwegians."

"Dismayed not this our captains?"

"Some fucking chance, they went right back at it. But I am faint, my gashes cry for help."

Space Admiral Duncan seemed to notice, for the first time, the state of the carpet. "So well thy words become thee as thy wounds. They smack of honor both. Go get him surgeons."

 

Bitches, Irene thought as she stood at attention for her quarterly Service and Fitness Rating. Sitting there grinning or grimacing--who could tell the difference. And look at those hair-dos! Which Calendar did they last have a facial? Low-maintenance is one thing, but surely this is an extreme. As I've proven, one needn't lose one's femininity to succeed in a man's world. They should be women, but their beards forbid me to interpret that they are.

Colonel Milverton took a choppy finger away from her lips. "Space Lieutenant Servalan...the reports have been most favorable. Space Admiral Duncan has happily received the news of your success. When he reads your personal venture in the rebels' fight, his wonders and his praises do content which should be yours or his. Space Command has authorized your promotion to replace Group Leader Macdonwald. And after that, who knows?"

"Group Leader of Glamis?" Major Kiglix said, with an odd giggle.

"Supreme Commander?" Colonel Theale put in diffidently.

"Lieutenant, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?" Milverton asked. "Hail!"

"Hail!" said Kiglix.

"Hail!" Theale murmured.

Servalan began to shiver.

"Dismissed, Space Captain!" Milverton turned to her comrades. "When shall we three meet again?" They keyed on their handcomms to find an available date.

Fraternization between officers and rankers was strictly forbidden--a rule that had never, as far back as the databanks stretched, been enforced against a male officer and female subordinate (human or mutoid). But it was one of the easiest ways for a female officer to ruin her career. Nearly as ruinous, in fact, as turning down a proposition from a superior officer.

She would probably have been able to get away with a drunken night at some spaceport, between assignments--that was considered a sort of Saturnalia, when ordinary rules went into suspended animation. What she chose to do--with the usual concern for military protocol she was to display throughout her career--was to appoint herself his keeper, forcing him to become her acolyte. She openly called in favors and twitched strings, until a battlefield commission was grudgingly approved for Travis.

She said--often, and sometimes within Travis' hearing, that she would teach him how to eat with a fork and otherwise instruct him in his role as an officer and a gentleman. She bought him out of the Guards and into Space Command (using money squeezed out of some gambling debts that members of a much older family owed to her brother Torquil). She didn't mind making enemies. In fact, it was fun.

Where, after all, would she find someone with the same symbiotic loyalty to his one and only supporter and proponent, who had dragged him upwards to an aristocratic world where he was otherwise entirely alone and treated with contempt?

And where would she find the same blend of desperately willed lust and humiliation? Who else could seize her and grovel at the same time? Who would be idiot enough to think, over and over again, that some time in the future she would satisfy the banal conventionality of what he longed to desire?

In the past, she had been forced to dominate men who had at least a spark of masochism, who got at least as much pleasure as she did from more or less elaborate pantomimes. How stale, flat, dull, and unprofitable that all seemed now. There was no pretense: Travis really was humiliated, there really was anger a millimeter below the surface. He could snap her spine with one hand, if he wanted to. He had killed, over and over. But she could force his submission. She could leave a handprint on his heart, and unlike a handprint on his arse, she could hit hard enough to hurt. After all those men who loathed Servalan all the time (or because) they fancied her rotten, it was a treat to be loved by one who could dredge up an erection largely on the basis of the consequences if he couldn't.

"It's not normal," he'd say, oh, he never learned.

"What would you know about normalcy?" she'd say, every time. Because she had seen the files. Where would armies be without them--the brassy, short-haired, good-natured gals who would keep your motor pool running and never, never disrupt the schedule by getting pregnant? The men's men, who would never want the war to end, who never longed to get home to wife and kiddies. The ones who would go over the top uncomplaining, if you only assigned them a golden-eyelashed public school lad as a lieutenant. They'd follow him to hell, for a chance to get into his...foxhole.

Colonel Ross slapped Servalan on the back. She moved out of range before he could contact any other part of her body. "Space Command has happily received news of your success. When they read your personal venture in the rebels' fight, their wonders and praises do contend which should be yours or theirs."

Servalan knew that it wasn't a good sign--in the zero-sum game that was Space Command, to achieve anything was to mortally offend those who hadn't achieved it, and every step up the ladder merely assigned one a new and additional set of enemies.

Ross said, "And for an earnest of a greater honor, they bade me call you Group Leader of Cawdor."

"Group Leader Sullayman is still alive," Servalan said. "Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?"

"He still may be alive--although I bet he wishes he wasn't--but under heavy judgment bears that life which he deserves to lose. Whether he was combined with those of Norway, or did line the rebel with hidden help and vantage, or that with both he labored in his empire's wrack, I know not. But treasons capital, confessed and proved, have overthrown him."

Servalan decided not to look a gift traitor in the mouth. But still and all, she was uneasy. The Service and Fitness Board's predictions had come true. That was all well and good, but why was she so frightened? Why did her seated heart knock at her ribs against the use of nature? She felt that she had somehow caused Sullayman's death merely by benefiting from it.

She tried to catch up on her paperwork, and for a while she was lulled. Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. She couldn't concentrate. Even an imaginary murder occupied her imagination. Should that go in the Alpha's Baby Book? First step, first pony, first cotillion, first commission, first murder?

Sullayman died bravely. He confessed his treasons frankly, implored the Federation's pardon, and set forth a deep repentance. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. He died as one that had been studied in his death to throw away the dearest thing he owed as if it were a careless trifle. It was unclear whether this was a result of his FSA training, his more recent absorption in the rebel cause, or whether he so disgusted with the regime he served that he would rather have a bullet in the back of the neck than put up with another day of it.

Space Admiral Duncan shook his head as he re-wound the viztape of the execution. "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face," he said to his adjutant. "He was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust."

Lieutenant Riellur quoted the well-known proverb about the dangers of relying on trust.

"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good," the Admiral said. "I shouldn't be a bit surprised if they find something nice for my son Malcolm in the shake-up."

Travis played the tape from Servalan one last time, before carrying out her instructions to destroy it. "Edward," she said, "They met me in the day of success, and they must know something. They said that something special would happen, and know I've been promoted again--Group Leader of Cawdor as well as Glamis. But Duncan is angling for that fucking moron of a son of his. This have I thought good to tell you, my dearest partner of greatness, that you won't lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised to you."

I dunno, Irene, Travis thought. Your nature is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way. You want to be great. You're not without ambition, but you don't have the sickness that goes along with it You need someone behind you, to help you.

Space Captain Servalan moved to Cawdor, and her adjutant, Space Second Lieutenant (temp.) Travis accompanied her. One day at Fort Cawdor they received a Priority One Crypt that Space Admiral Duncan would be paying a brief, high-security visit, accompanied only by one aide-de-camp--his son--and three mutoids.

"My dearest love," Servalan said (it never hurt to keep the chain taut) "the Admiral comes here tonight."

"When's he leaving?" Travis asked.

"Tomorrow," she said, beginning to giggle. "That's what he thinks." They had a good laugh at that one.

"Well, then," Servalan said.

"You can't--" Travis said.

"I can," Servalan said.

"But how..."

"I'll put a suppressant in the mutoids' serum and get Malcolm drunk. Then you'll take a skewer that's more or less the same size as the mutoids' feeding syringe, stab Duncan and his half-wit son, and then we'll execute the mutoids for treason and rebellion before they so much as wake up."

"Someone's bound to suspect, there'll be an inquiry, we'll never get away with it..."

"That's just where you're wrong. The way the Federation works is that, if you're slack enough to get yourself murdered, then everyone who's still walking around thinks you bloody well deserved it."

"Doesn't sound promising for the life expectancy."

"Well, what of it? A short life but a merry one."

Travis caught her up in his arms and whirled her around. "Irene, darling, we'll have a dozen sons!"

She fixed him with a liquid-helium glance. "Second Lieutenant, you forget yourself."

Travis had to reassure himself that the weapon in his hand was real, not a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

In the dining room, Servalan rang the bell for another decanter of soma. Malcolm was just about one drink from sliding under the table, and the mutoids were already glassy in suspension. That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold, she thought. What hath quenched them hath given me fire.

She walked into the State Bedroom, where Space Admiral Duncan was snoring. I suppose I might as well take care of it, Servalan thought. Travis isn't good for much. But why keep a dog and bark yourself? If Duncan had not resembled her father as he slept, she might have done it. Then again, some people come from families where the resemblance would have been a positive incentive.

"Where's that knocking coming from?" Travis asked. "What is it with me when every noise appalls me? Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more..." Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, if I stick my hand in the sea, that'll turn red."

"My hands are of your color," Servalan said, "But I shame to wear a heart so white. A little water clears us of this deed. Go get some water and wash this filthy witness from your hand. Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie there--go carry them and smear the sleepy mutoids with blood." If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself...

To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself, Travis thought. And wasn't that the first dropped stitch for his later, more dramatic unravelment? Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst.

The best thing to do was to go to sleep, things would look better in the morning. But he didn't sleep much that night. He didn't sleep much after that anyway.

Fairly nearby, someone screamed. But that was hardly exceptional enough to attract much attention. Everyone was a bit--on edge. I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been my senses would have cooled to hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as Life were in't. I have supped full with horrors. Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thought, cannot once start me.

There was a candle on the table, abbreviated to a stub. Servalan blew it out.

**Author's Note:**

> This futuristic version of "Macbeth" was written for my all-Shakespeare B7 zine, "Of Comfort and Despair."


End file.
